Is the DOJ "anti-weaponization" fund legal?

Peter Shane joins us now to discuss this. He's a distinguished scholar in residence and an adjunct professor of law at New York University's School of Law. Good morning, Peter. Thanks for being with us. Let's just start at the top level here. Is this legal? What is the legal basis of this fund? Because you wonder why it was dropped on senators at the last minute, not in the initial agreement. There is a strong argument that the fund is not lawful. What the president has done is tried to take advantage of a permanent fund that exists for the Justice Department to settle cases brought against it. Sort of the mechanism here is that Trump sued the government-- has sued himself, as he himself has said-- in order to recover damages that supposedly were imposed on him because of the leak of his tax records under the Biden administration. And then the government-- again, which he is in charge of-- supposedly is able to take this judgment fund that exists at the Justice Department and use it to settle the litigation against the president. Excuse me, against the government. And it can settle-- again, the theory is that it can bring the settlement by creating this fund. But this mechanism is simply an attempt to get around Congress's power of the purse. The Constitution requires the president to spend money for purposes that Congress mandates and doesn't want him to spend money-- doesn't allow him to spend money that Congress has not appropriated. So this is just a scheme to get around that power of the purse.

So what might it take to get around this use of the fund in such a way? Can the president get around some of the internal opposition in his party? And on the flip side, how can Congress get its oversight powers back in this way? The way for Congress to do it is simply to enact legislation that prohibits the use of federal funds for-- well, I would say for offering compensation to the J6ers, but you could say for offering compensation to anyone as part of a settlement for a lawsuit that is not a genuine lawsuit. This is a kind of scheme or collusion, if you will, between Trump himself and his own Justice Department. And again, there's just a legal question whether the settlement fund can be used to settle a case that is actually not a case, that is not really within the court's power ever to entertain. There is a lawsuit, as you undoubtedly know, that was brought by police officers who were working the Capitol on that day. The issue there is one of standing. Can they show that they are being injured by the existence of the fund? Their argument is that they are being injured, that they are routinely subject to threats of bodily harm, death threats because of their role on January 6, and that the fund actually increases the risk by basically telling people if you engage in violence on Trump's behalf against officers of the United States, you have a chance to get rich. Yeah, they're fearful of the precedent. But we'll see this get tangled up, I'm sure, in many different legal ways. Peter Shane, thanks for laying it out for us, joining us from Brooklyn.